The Body of Il Duce Read Free Page A

wearing his ever-present beret, standing next to a tiny Togliatti, who looked very timid behind his glasses. “In honor of the foreign delegation,” Togliatti is saying, “the famed executioner comrade Walter Audisio will sing ‘How I Executed Benito.’” 9 Colonel Valerio was subjected not only to the press’s irony but also to accusations. An article in Il Tempo claimed Audisio was in possession of lists of people who would be outlawed when the Communists mounted their uprising. Accompanying the article was a photograph of an apartment building that belonged to the party. “In this house at Via Pavia 4 in Rome,” read the caption, “Audisio is said to be hiding weapons and a plan to take the capital.” 10
    Fanciful suspicions notwithstanding, Mussolini’s executioner did play an important role in more clandestine activities of the Communist Party, a role that brought him obsessive police surveillance. The critical attention in the anti-Communist press must also have enhanced Audisio’s charisma. Certainly, as national elections—scheduled for April 18, 1948—approached, the pro-government press waved the threatening image of Colonel Valerio before good Italians, as if to say, The man who killed Il Duce could kill any of you. In early postwar Italy, Audisio was also infamous, a negative model.
    All the ghosts of the past hovered over the election. The Italian Social Movement, for one, offered policies and candidates with the definite stamp of the Republic of Salò. At the opposite end of the political spectrum, Il Duce’s executioner, Walter Audisio, a candidate for the united Socialists and Communists, ran against Tito Zaniboni, the Socialist Unity candidate for the voting district of Cuneo-Alessandria-Asti in Piedmont, a man who had once tried to shoot Mussolini. The Christian Democrats, somewhat more cautious about evoking historical ghosts, had based their campaign on the theme of “turning the page.” But that did not stop Mario Scelba, the Christian Democrat interior minister, from stepping into the historical fray by disbanding the partisan units that had flanked the police since the Liberation. Eager to ingratiate himself, Vincenzo Agnesina, police chief of Milan, went so far as to arrest police officers sympathetic to the Communists. The election campaign in Milan took place in a climate poisoned by memories of the civil war. There wasn’t a rally of the Socialist-Communist front that didn’t have a placard extolling the memory of Piazzale Loreto.

    The executioner, Walter Audisio. ( Foto Publifoto/Olympia )
    In Milan, as election day approached, celebrations of the third anniversary of the Liberation turned into a clash between anti-Fascists and the police. The anti-Fascists had wanted to hold a ceremony in Piazzale Loreto honoring the martyrs of August 10, 1944. Angry that the police chief barred them from entering the piazza, demonstrators pushed past the barriers and moved in. The police then charged the crowd, and in the scuffle that followed one Carabinieri officer was killed. The Resistance veterans succeeded in taking the piazza but it was a Pyrrhic victory, since the Christian Democrats’ triumph at the polls ushered in a long period that would leave them out in the cold. Only a month or so after the election, Jesuit priest Riccardo Lombardi—the foremost interpreter of the Christian Democrat line—announced at the Ara Coeli in Rome that the Lord would punish those responsible for Mussolini’s “assassination.”
    Less apocalyptically, the popular illustrated weeklies targeted Audisio. Now an elected deputy, Audisio had not yet taken his seat in the chamber before a parliamentary reporter described him as “ever-present and belligerent,” the captain of the “Communist boxing team.” 11 As the elections receded into the past, the polemics failed to die down: throughout the entire